The Valley of Silent Men eBook

They were halfway through the Chute when he shot against
a rock with terrific force. The contact tore
Marette from him. He plunged for her, missed
his grip, and then saw her opposite him, clinging
to the same rock. The babiche rope had saved her.
Fastened about her waist and tied to his wrist, it
still held them together—­with the five
feet of rock between them.

Panting, their life half beaten out of them, their
eyes met over that rock. Now that he was out
of the water, the blood began streaming from Kent’s
arms and shoulders and face, but he smiled at her
as a few moments before she had smiled at him.
Her eyes were filled with the pain of his hurts.
He nodded back in the direction from which they had
come.

“We’re out of the worst of it,”
he tried to shout. “As soon as we’ve
got our wind, I will climb over the rock to you.
It won’t take us longer than a couple of minutes,
perhaps less, to make the quiet water at the end of
the channel.”

She heard him and nodded her reply. He wanted
to give her confidence. And he had no intention
of resting, for her position filled him with a terror
which he fought to hide. The babiche rope, not
half as large around as his little finger, had swung
her to the downstream side of the rock. It was
the slender thread of buckskin and his own weight
that were holding her. If the buckskin should
break—­

He thanked God that it was the tough babiche that
had been around his pack. An inch at a time he
began to draw himself up on the rock. The undertow
behind the rock had flung a mass of Marette’s
long hair toward him, so that it was a foot or two
nearer to him than her clinging hands. He worked
himself toward that, for he saw that he could reach
it more quickly than he could reach her. At the
same time he had to keep his end of the babiche taut.
It was, from the beginning, an almost superhuman task.
The rock was slippery as oil. Twice his eyes
shot down-stream, with the thought that it might be
better to cast himself bodily into the water, and
after that draw Marette to him by means of the babiche.
What he saw convinced him that such action would be
fatal. He must have Marette in his arms.
If he lost her—­even for a few seconds—­the
life would be beaten from her body in that rock-strewn
maelstrom below.

And then, suddenly, the babiche cord about his wrist
grew loose. The reaction almost threw him back.
With the loosening of it a cry came from Marette.
It all happened in an instant, in almost less time
than his brain could seize upon the significance of
it—­the slipping of her hands from the rock,
the shooting of her white body away from him in the
still whiter spume of the rapids, The rock had cut
the babiche, and she was gone! With a cry that
was like the cry of a madman he plunged after her.
The water engulfed him. He twisted himself up,
freeing himself from the undertow. Twenty feet
ahead of him—­thirty—­he caught
a glimpse of a white arm and then of Marette’s
face, before she disappeared in a wall of froth.